This article originally appeared in Mongabay.

• The Congolese government has officially recognized community ownership of a conservation area linking two national parks in the Democratic Republic of Congo, giving hope for the survival of the Grauer’s gorilla, a critically endangered species.
• The gorilla, found only in DRC, faces threats from habitat loss, poaching for bushmeat, and the effects of lingering civil unrest in the region.
• The Nkuba Conservation Area is co-managed by local communities and the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, with the latter providing jobs and training initiatives for women.
• The years-long effort to develop the conservation area and now to maintain it points to the importance of engaging local communities in conservation.

by Marlowe Starling

“We’ve shown them that we aren’t the path of least resistance,” said a local organizer. “We are the path of resilience.”

This article originally appeared in Common Dreams.

By Julia Conley Community activists in Memphis, Tennessee and northwest Mississippi celebrated a grassroots victory on Saturday after two oil companies canceled plans to build a pipeline that would have run through wetlands and several low-income, majority-Black neighborhoods.

Valero and Plains All American Pipeline had long planned to construct the Byhalia Connection pipeline, which would have been 49 miles long and linked two pipelines that transport crude oil to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico.

The somber truth is that the vast bulk of nature’s staggering abundance has already disappeared. We live in a world characterized primarily by the relative silence and emptiness of its natural spaces. Underlying this devastation is the ideology of human supremacy—claiming innate superiority over nonhuman forms of life. But is human supremacy innate to humanity, or rather something specific pertaining to our dominant culture? This excerpt originally appeared in Resilience.

Excerpted from The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe ( published in June in the UK , and available July 13 in the US )

Editor’s note: We are very thankful to George Price for his wonderful review of the book Bright Green Lies. Book Review: Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It By Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Max Wilbert

By George Price, originally published on his blog learningearthways.

This book, Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It, by Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Max Wilbert, will probably be the most important book published anywhere in 2021, on the most important issue facing all Life on Earth—why we must end the prevailing human economic and industrial practices and the anthropocentric cultural worldviews. It will probably also be the most reviled, attacked, suppressed, censored, dismissed, misrepresented, and slandered book published this year, as well, for some of the same reasons that many people virulently attacked and censored the documentary film, “ Planet of the Humans,” last year. Why?

This article is from the blog buildingarevolutionarymovement.

Social movements are important because when collective action spreads across an entire society it leads to a cycle of protest. When such a cycle is organised around opposed or multiple classes or interest groups then this can lead to revolutions [1]. This is simplistic as there are many causes and factors that lead to revolutions, which I’ll attempt to unpack in future posts. This post will focus on describing the characteristics of social movements to frame a future post listing the history of social movements in Britain.

We wouldn’t say “it” or “that” when referring to humans, so why would we for other sentient individuals? This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

By Debra Merskin, Carrie P. Freeman and Alicia Graef

Happy has to be one of the most ironic names for an Asian elephant whose living conditions have prompted groundbreaking legal action on her behalf. Her advocates are certain that she is not happy at all and are seeking to free her from her current confines.

By Rebecca Wildbear

I was diagnosed with cancer when I was 21. Scientifically, the odds were that I would die. They could have rolled me aside and let it happen, but doctors and loved ones did what they could to keep me alive. They tried to save my life even though they did not know if it would work.

The Earth is suffering. She does not want her rivers poisoned and dammed, her mountains blown up and mined, or her ecosystems and biodiversity destroyed. If she received the same care as me, perhaps we could stop the harm. Efforts to help show care and respect, whatever tomorrow brings.

Editor’s note: As radical environmentalists, we can not understand how any culture can be so stupid to put poison on their own food. The widespread application of herbicides, pesticides and all kinds of poisonous chemicals to our holy mother earth’s surface as an attempt to control weed and insect “pests” is just another expression of this culture’s deep disconnection and hatred of all life.

The following excerpt is from Toxic Legacy: How the Weedkiller Glyphosate Is Destroying Our Health and the Environment by Stephanie Seneff, PhD (Chelsea Green Publishing, July 2021). It is reprinted with permission from the publisher and has been adapted for the web. Source: Chelsea Green Publishing via Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute

This article originally appeared in Mongabay.

• A new risk analysis has found that the tipping points of five of Earth’s subsystems — the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, the Greenland Ice Sheet, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Amazon rainforest — could interact with each other in a destabilizing manner.
• It suggests that these changes could occur even before temperatures reach 2°C (3.6°F) above pre-industrial levels, which is the upper limit of the Paris Agreement.
• The interactions between the different tipping elements could also lower critical temperature thresholds, essentially allowing tipping cascades to occur earlier than expected, according to the research.
• Experts not involved in the study say the findings are a significant contribution to the field, but do not adequately address the timescales over which these changes could occur.

by Elizabeth Claire Alberts

This article originally appeared in CommonDreams.

“However, justice for Berta will never be truly complete until everyone who took part in the crime, including those who planned it, is brought to justice.”

By BRETT WILKINS, COMMON DREAMS STAFF WRITER

Human rights advocates on Monday welcomed the conviction of Roberto David Castillo Mejía, a Honduran businessman and former military intelligence officer, for the March 2016 assassination of Indigenous environmental activist Berta Cáceres, while calling on authorities in the Central American nation to bring everyone involved in planning the murder to justice.